Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of operating systems and, more particularly, to minimizing overhead in resolving operating system symbols.
Functionality of an operating system kernel can be extended via dynamically loadable modules also known as kernel extensions. The kernel extensions can interact with services provided by the operating system kernel and can extend the services of, or provide new services to, programs that execute on the operating system. Programs and shared libraries might reference symbols in the operating system kernel. The operating system kernel resolves the references and identifies information associated with the symbols. Currently, various versioning systems are used to differentiate between different versions of operating system symbols and to provide unique symbol resolution to the programs/shared libraries based on the version of the symbol requested.